When the Revolution Reached the Countryside: Use and Destruction of Imported Wares in Alta Gracia,Córdoba, 1810

During the 1970s, excavations were conducted in Alta Gracia, Córdoba, Argentina, in a compound that once was a seventeenth and eighteenth-century Jesuit Convent and is presently a museum. During the excavation, an amazing amount of historic material never studied before was discovered inside a sealed privy. After studying the material, we were able to identify the objects as once belonging to Santiago de Liniers, a man who successfully resisted and expelled British invaders from Buenos Aires. As a result, he was appointed Viceroy, though eventually he was shot in 1810 for confronting the Independence movement. Our hypothesis is that these objects were thrown into the privy as a gesture of contempt associated with his capture and execution.     

Assessing Spatial Dependence in Count Data: Winsorized and Spatial Filter Specification Alternatives to the Auto-Poisson Model

The auto-Poisson probability model furnishes an obvious tool for modeling counts of geographically distributed rare events. Unfortunately, its original specification can accommodate only negative spatial autocorrelation, which itself is a rare event. More recent alternative reformulations, namely, the Winsorized and spatial filter specifications, circumvent this drawback. A comparison of their performances presented in this article reveals some of their relative advantages and disadvantages.     

Veterinary immunology as colonial science: method and quantification in the investigation of horsesickness in South Africa, C. 1905-1945

This article examines the practice of veterinary immunology in South Africa during the first half of the twentieth century through an analysis of research into a horsesickness vaccine at the Onderstepoort Veterinary Institute. From the early 1900s, Arnold Theiler prioritized research into horsesickness, by then defined as an insect-borne disease caused by an ultravisible virus. He succeeded in devising a means of prophylaxis using a simultaneous injection of infective blood and immune serum, but he discovered antigenically different strains of the virus, which could overcome the immunity produced by his treatment. The practical value of Theiler's methods was further limited by difficulties in standardizing the biological material used in immunization, the results of which remained too erratic for application on a large scale. No further advances were made until the 1930s, by which time Onderstepoort had been drawn more closely into international scientific networks. Using techniques derived from research into yellow fever in America and canine distemper in Britain, the Onderstepoort scientist Raymond Alexander invented a method of immunization that utilized the propagation of the horsesickness virus in the brains of mice. Alexander's methods, which were characterized by successful technical adaptation and innovation, depended upon methods of quantification first developed by Paul Ehrlich to standardize diphtheria antitoxin during the 1890s. During the 1940s, vaccination expanded rapidly in South Africa, and Onderstepoort later exported the vaccine and associated technology to other countries affected by horsesickness.     

Han Chinese,Manchu, and Western Spaces: The Changing Facade of Imperial Education in Qing Beijing

The physical spaces of imperial education during the Qing were carefully constructed sites of political architecture that sought to shape the behavior of princes, emperors, and their teachers while projecting dynamic images of power. This article examines a range of buildings associated with the Qing pedagogical apparatus. It argues that the changing spaces of imperial education drew on both classical ideals and international iconographies of power to create and disseminate a fluid vision of rule. In the eighteenth century, the Qianlong emperor ordered the construction of the Biyong Hall at the center of the Imperial Academy in Beijing for exclusive use by the emperor during the Imperial Lecture, combining classical Han Chinese and Manchu expressions of authority. Throughout the nineteenth century, heirs to the throne and young emperors were trained in classrooms filled with calligraphy penned by their ancestors. Aphorisms drawing on the Confucian classics, as well as Daoist and Buddhist texts, urged the young rulers to strive for dynastic renewal. Finally, at the start of the twentieth century as the Qing worked to transition to a constitutional monarchy, imperial classrooms around Beijing were infused with Western architectural styles, incorporating new strands of authority for the reforming Qing dynasty.